This article tackles a relatively under-studied aspect of the Christianisation of the Roman aristocracy. It considers the influence of Christian norms on a key stage in the elite male life course: service to the state. Drawing on the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, Augustine of Hippo and Theodoret of Cyrrhus to imperial officials, this article argues that a Christian rhetoric of office-holding had developed across the Mediterranean by the first half of the fifth century. It traces these authors’ varying expectations of how the religious identities of elite Christian men would shape their political agency. Their letters demonstrate the diffusion of Christian political ideas within the imperial state — and the terms on which Christian affiliations and traditional public careers were understood to be compatible — under the Theodosian dynasty.

Building inscriptions are not a good proxy for building activity or, by extension, prosperity. In the part of Roman North Africa where they are the most common, the majority of surviving building inscriptions document the construction of religious buildings by holders of local priesthoods, usually of the imperial cult. The rise of such texts in the second century a.d., and their demise in the early third century, have no parallel in the epigraphic evidence for other types of construction, and should not be used as evidence for the pace of construction overall. Rather than economic change, these developments reflect shifts in the prospects of aspirational local elites, for whom priesthoods served as springboards to more prestigious positions. These positions were linked to Carthage through administrative arrangements that made this city the metropolis for scores of dependent towns and their ambitious elites.

This survey does not aim at completeness. It is a personal selection, on the one hand, of recent epigraphic work which is of significance and interest to an ancient historian, and, on the other hand, of those epigraphic ‘tools of the trade’ which are important for anyone trying to interpret an inscription. But we start with some more narrowly epigraphic topics.

If the death of Louis Robert and concern for the future of the Bulletin épigraphique overshadowed the last review, it is fitting that this should begin with the good news of the rebirth of the Bulletin, produced since 1987 by an international, although largely French, team of specialists and edited by Ph. Gauthier. The archicubal verve may be missing, but the coverage of the new version is good and adds usefully to that of the old.

The publication of a second fourth-century epitaph from Laodicea Combusta, engraved on the tomb of two of its bishops, Severus and Eugenius, calls for fresh study, from a new angle, of the epitaph of the persecuted bishop Julius Eugenius of the same city, which was first published (with a provisional text) in the Expositor in 1908, and has already become the subject of a considerable literature. An opportunity therefore offers itself to present English readers with a complete and (I hope) final text of the bishop's epitaph. This is all the more necessary that an English version, inaccurate in almost every detail, has been incorporated in a text-book issued by the Cambridge University Press.

This paper begins in the year 1569, when a hefty commentary on the Lives of Cornelius Nepos was published in Paris by one of the Royal Professors, Denys Lambin (known to classicists as Lambinus). The event intrigued me for two reasons. Firstly because, in France at that time, history was not a proper subject for professors. A professor could deal in Greek and Latin poetry, in oratory, philosophy, maths or Hebrew, or of course in the degree subjects theology, medicine and law; but history, including ancient history, was mostly a popular interest among the cultured ruling class, who preferred to read it in elegant vernacular versions, like Amyot's Diodorus and Plutarch, not in the dusty didactic form of text and commentary. So why did a professor, famous for his work on poetry and philosophy, suddenly devote himself to Nepos? The second puzzle was that, within weeks of publishing this commentary, Lambinus was violently attacked for it, and came close to losing both his job and his life. How, I wondered, could commenting on Nepos so seriously endanger the health?

The noteworthy discovery which I have the honour of illustrating for the Journal of Roman Studies is a very recent one, and it was unlooked for because one would not expect to find a rich and beautiful series of small artistic bronzes among the ruins of a great bakehouse. This building consisted of a double series of rooms in which are gathered together the machines for crushing the grain, the machines for kneading the flour (machinae quae farinae subiguntur), and, lastly, two enormous ovens for the making of the bread. This great bakehouse, placed in the heart of the city, near the temple of Vulcan, was destroyed by a fire in the third century, as is proved by certain coins, and it was never re-built. The small bronzes, touched but not destroyed by the fire, were found among the ashes covering the pavement of the ground floor, and since they have nothing in common with the great bakehouse, they come assuredly from the first floor of the building, which was perhaps the dwelling-house of the miller, and it may be supposed from this that they were the religious and artistic furniture of his private chapel.